


A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest

by Ratchet



Category: Transformers Generation One
Genre: Cybertron, Gen, Mild Gore, Walt Whitman - freeform - Freeform, War Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-12
Updated: 2011-04-12
Packaged: 2017-10-17 23:41:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/182607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ratchet/pseuds/Ratchet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pre-Arc.Before he was the CMO with the deadliest of aim he was just a field medic still young and trying to come to terms with just how horrifying war can be. This is a short snap shot in time of a moment that made Ratchet really think about just what his world has been consumed by during the early years of the war on Cybertron.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sort of Parody to Walt Whitman’s poem “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest” im not much of a poet so I did it in prose and I really rather like it. Whitman’s narrator made me think of Ratchet so I rearranged things to be on Cybertron not to long after the War began. This can be seen as an AU I suppose. It’s set before Ratchet joins Optimus directly his just a field medic here. If you’d like to read the poem just Google it.

All around us is nothing but destruction it obscures everything, the ruins of this once great city now lay dark and empty. Our feet make little sound as we march on. I’m hard put to even see to the darkened sky past the half toppled structures that surround us nothing looks as it once did and my platoon has become lost in the hast of retreat. We lost many this orn past, the Decepticon completely over whelmed us.

Dim light can be seen from a building ahead. A clearing in the wasteland we wander suddenly opens before us and in its heart is a large old Temple to Primus turned hospital we halt in the unsteady light coming from it’s half there windows. I venture in if only for a moment, perhaps I can help while the lieutenant gets our bearings. The sight beyond the doors is not something easily put to words, Shadows of deepest, deepest black, barley lit by dim flickering lights. By these lights I can just make out the vague forms of mechs and femme strun across the floor and on pews to be tended to. A small noise draws my eyes down to the floor were by my feet lays a youngling leaking to death, a vicious shot having ripped through his abdomen. I quickly do all I can for the young mech, far to young to be involved in this horror filled war, I weld his main energon line closed to stop the leaking but so many other vital parts have been damaged or destroyed there’s really little I can do, his body is already beginning to lose color to dull.

When I can do no more I let my optics sweep across the crowded room trying to absorb all I see. Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of old energon and other mech fluids seems to assaults my senses a new. So many forms all covered in ether there own or others life fluids there every where even filling the yard outside some on the bare ground others on sheets of scrap metal or stretchers some already fading to dull shades on the very brink of the matrix. An occasional scream or cry rents the air as the medics shout orders or call for different parts. The Surgeons instruments catch the dim lights and glisten almost menacingly even though there meant to save. I began to chant an old prayer to primus low under my breath as I continue to breather the sickening odor on the air I suddenly hear my lieutenant’s voice over my comm. ordering me to fall in but first I bend back down to the dying youngling at my feet his optics are open yet dim he gives me a weak half smile then his optics go dark his colors fade completely and I speed forth back in to the darkness, the ruins. My platoon marches on to our next rendezvous point and though we now know our way I am feeling more lost then ever along this unknown road I am marching.


End file.
